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A New History for an Old Skyscraper

The Woolworth Building, known for its height when it opened in 1913, is being extensively renovated. (Photo: Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times)

Updated, 12:38 p.m. | On the evening of April 24, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a tiny button inside the White House, lighting up the Woolworth Building in Manhattan. It was “the tallest structure in the world, with the one exception of the Eiffel Tower in Paris,” The New York Times reported, and it was a marvel of architecture and engineering.

The 400-page book is the culmination of more than 15 years of research by Gail Fenske, a professor of architecture at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., who began the project as a doctoral dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The book provides a new perspective on some of the most notable aspects of the Woolworth Building, like its eclectic design — Beaux-Arts with Gothic ornamentation, over steel-frame engineering. The building has been seen as “a throwback, a historicist building, not truly a modern building,” Professor Fenske said in an interview, adding that she instead sees the building as “in a sense emblematic of modernity,” capturing both “the excitement of the new — the breaking of technological barriers — and also, on the other hand, a discomfort with it.”

Designed by Cass Gilbert, the building, at 233 Broadway, between Park Place and Barclay Street, was commissioned by the retail magnate Frank W. Woolworth and constructed between 1910 and 1913. Woolworth famously financed the building without loans or help from developers. “He financed it on his own,” Professor Fenske said. “It was unnerving to speculators, because he could do whatever he wanted.”

The book contains numerous illustrations, including one showing a 1929 advertisement for the building, calling it a “Cathedral of Commerce” — a name that has stuck — and lauding its height (792 feet), number of floors (60), weight (206 million pounds), floor area (15 acres), exterior windows (3,000), tons of steel (24,000), bricks (17 million) and tons of terra cotta (7,500).

In the interview, Professor Fenske said she initially disliked the moniker “Cathedral of Commerce,” finding it glib and simplistic. But as she studied the context in which the tower rose, she said, she began to see the name as appropriate. Its Gothic gestures suggested comfort, “moralizing evocations” of the old world from which many of Woolworth’s customers had come. (Although Woolworth, the 5- and 10-cent emporium, was in some ways the Wal-Mart of its era, it also differed from today’s big-box retailers. For instance, Woolworth’s carried finely crafted products imported from Europe that would be particularly familiar — and appealing — to immigrant customers.) By turning to Beaux-Arts design, Professor Fenske writes, Gilbert and Woolworth “resisted the forces of sensationalism and spectacle” associated with advertising and mass culture.

The book places the Woolworth Building in the context of its time and place: the booming commercial culture of early 20th century New York; the often unsettling experience of modernization; advances in technology and communications; and a new phenomenon of “urban spectatorship” that made skyscrapers sources of public wonder and admiration.

Many innovations set the Woolworth Building apart. It contained a shopping arcade, health club, barber shop, restaurant, social club and even an observatory. Its use of technology — including an innovative water supply system, a electrical generating plan, high-speed electric elevators providing both local and express service and what Professor Fenske calls “the first prominent use of architectural floodlighting in the world” — also set it apart. So did the construction process, run by the builder Louis Horowitz of the Thompson-Starrett Company, who managed to avoid labor conflict, rationalize the building process and set a record for speed — paving the way for the famously rapid completion of the Empire State Building nearly 20 years later.

Summarizing the legacy of the Woolworth Building, Professor Fenske writes:

The question of whether the Woolworth Building is, indeed, a great work of architecture may still be open to debate. Yet Woolworth and Gilbert’s project represented in the eyes of contemporaries more than a vulgar contraption for producing a profit, and more than a dubious expression of corporate power, egregious advertising, or an aggressive assault on New York’s new signature skyline.

As the building approaches its centennial, she argues, New Yorkers should recognize not only its “aesthetic distinction” but also how “it reflected and refracted the many dreams and obsessions of the urban society that produced it.”

I work in the building, and I haven’t seen their offices here, although I haven’t particularly looked. There is a section of the building occupied by the City, a section occupied by high-end offices, and the third section, I am not sure about.

I’m an amateur architecture junkie, and this has always been one of my favorite buildings, along with another Cass Gilbert building at Broadway and Chambers, just a few blocks north. I was inside just once, and was sad to make the trek again a few years ago only to learn that the building had been closed to visitors after Sept. 11.

And not a mention of the new, dull-faced, architecturally vapid condo towers rising all around it, blocking off views of it from all directions except (thankfully) city hall park? One is already completed, and now another one is under construction on its west flank. I dread the day when my view of the skyline loses such a fascinating and historic component.

Of course, given Bloomberg’s penchant for trying to sell off our public parks to private bidders, it might not be long before even the front of the building is cast in the shadow of another Cathedral to Conspicuous Consumtion!

Too bad that next to this great building, and nearly as tall, was recently built yet another ugly, monolithic high-rise apartment. Our city is being overdeveloped, in the name of Freedom of Capitalists, and it is adversely affecting our quality of life. Love the Woolworth Building.

There are hardly any buidings of appreciable beauty that still allow access. Their lobbies, once social spaces, are now staging areas for the elevators and nothing else. Surrender any thought about actually loitering, even if you work there. Calling Building Security!!!
This city is looking more like Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” every day.Do you really think Water Tunnel #3 is for water? Start picking out your wallpaper.

“The question of whether the Woolworth Building is, indeed, a great work of architecture may still be open to debate,” Professor Fenske writes.

Huh?!

With a suggestion like that, one has to question Prof. Fenske’s credibility. Sounds as though she drank the kool-aid of latter 20th C. architectural thought. Using the hackneyed expression “historicist” to describe the style is so so boring. ALL architecture from the beginning of time through the 1940s or so was historical in its evolution and thus spectacular. And terrible since then as history was not something architects learned from, but rather threw out the window.

The building is a stroke of beautiful genius. It’s one of those structures that one stumbles upon when he or she is new to the city and cannot believe their senses. Bravo, Mr. Gilbert.

The Woolworth Building -at least the tower portion- should have been converted to a hotel with public spaces at and near the base. It has the potential to become a major Downtown venue for political events centered around City Hall, business events via Wall Street, and social events for the growing Downtown community. The views across City Hall Park across the Brooklyn Bridge are protected.

Coming up from college in Virginia to NYC in the early ’80s, I simply snuck into the Woolworth Building and rode to the top to try to catch the view, then did the same thing in the Chrysler Building (all the way up to the triangular-shaped windows at the top), onto the outdoor balconies near the top of the now-AIG Building on Pine Street (shown to me by some friendly office workers there), and into a bizarrely empty 100-ish floor of one of the WTC towers.
It now seems like a different world.

Amazing that there is still “debate” about whether the building is a great work of architecture. Despite its historicism, the overwhelming impression is of a vertical shaft that virtually screams “skyscraper!”. ayn rand would have been apoplectic about it because of both these supposedly warring qualities. What is certain is that Woolworth gave New York its legendary lower Manhattan skyline, familiar and thrilling to generations of immigrants and cruisers, a skyline that produced several other unique shafts and made Manhattan seem to surge [forgive the word] up from the harbor. That skyline has long since been banalized and destroyed by the faceless and hulking glass containers that now cover a once-majestic scene. To find an American skyline now, one has to travel to Chicago, improperly deemed the birth of the sktyscraper, or, [heavens!] San Francisco.

I remember reading the plaque on the front of the Woolworth Building that, indeed, designates it as a “Cathedral of Commerce.” The conflation of religion and business in the phrase always fascinated me.

Is it really still “open to debate” whether the Woolworth Building is a great work of architecture? I defy anyone but a truly cold-hearted Miesian to look at the Woolworth Buiidng and not be inspired. It is (as has been for 95 years) one of the most most beautiful tall buildings in the world.

Worth a mention but not entirely on subject, the Woolworth building also helped break tech barriers by housing part of the Manhattan project in the 40s. (Maybe it needs a Geiger scanning …?)

And hey #8 – 99 Church was recently demolished, exposing the entire west side of the WW building. Get a viewing soon (or not soon); Silverstein plans to completely obscure said side with a skyscraper hotel/condos.

And #11 – there’s no quality of living down there to impact in the first place, not with the Freedom Mall’s round-the-clock construction set to suffer bureaucratic and financial delays for another 15 years, at least. Some days, you can’t even see the WW through the dust from piledriving.

Helping my father look for office space in 1974, we viewed a small suite way up in the top of the Woolworth Building. If I remember correctly, the interior walls sloped up there, following the outline of the structure. And the lobby was wonderful, too. [Dad ended up on 74 Trinity Place, gracefully overlooking the Trinity Church yard, and a particular bench behind the church where lunch-time couples would cuddle. Do they still?]

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